OJMCHE Book Club

OJMCHE’s book club meets every other month midday at the museum. The book selection for November 2026 is The Mathematician’s Shiva by Stuart Rojstaczer.

Stuart Rojstaczer’s The Mathematician’s Shiva is a humorous, bittersweet debut novel about family that brilliantly captures humanity’s drive to not only survive, but to solve the impossible.

Alexander “Sasha” Karnokovitch and his family would like to mourn the passing of his mother, Rachela, with modesty and dignity. But Rachela, a famous Polish émigré mathematician and professor at the University of Wisconsin, is rumored to have solved the million-dollar Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem. Rumor also has it that she took the solution to her grave out of spite. To Sasha’s chagrin, a ragtag group of socially challenged mathematicians arrives in Madison and crashes the shiva, vowing to do whatever it takes to find the solution — even if it means prying up the floorboards for Rachela’s notes.

For fans of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Everything Is Illuminated.